E-Mail Stamping with From-Header Validation

ABSTRACT

Effective aspects of stamping outbound e-mail are combined with a registration system for e-mail senders. A mail sender participates by registering From: line information with a trusted third-party repository known as a stamp authority. When the sender sends an e-mail message, a hash of the From: line is compared against the From: line information for the sender stored in the repository. If the result is a match, the e-mail is allowed to be sent, subject to any other restrictions imposed by the stamping process. If there is not a match, then the e-mail is prevented from being stamped.

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional application No. 60/686,686, filed on Jun. 1, 2005, and incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

1. Field of the Invention

The present invention relates generally to e-mail security. In particular, the present invention is directed toward the registration and subsequent authentication of senders of e-mail.

2. Description of Background Art

The wide availability of domain name addresses for purchase has led to the nefarious practice of “phishing”, in which a bad actor sends e-mails that appear to be from a reputable source and typically encourage the recipient to click on a link within the e-mail message and provide personal information to the sender. For example, the domain names “bank-of-america-online.com”, “chasebank.cc”, “my-citibank.us” are a sample of legitimate-sounding names that are currently available to the public for purchase.

Because the DNS records of a domain are under the control of the domain owner, messages sent from the domain will be marked as legitimate by conventional domain authentication schemes such as the Sender Policy Framework (SPF), the Sender ID Framework, DomainKeys, and Identified Internet Mail. That is, if a sender purchases the “bank-of-america-online.com” domain and sends an e-mail with a From header of “customerservice@bank-of-america-online.com”, the message will be authenticated because it is indeed from who it claims to be from—the owner/operator of the bank-of-america-online.com domain.

Additionally, some e-mail programs (such as Microsoft's Hotmail, for example) display messages in an inbox using only the “display” string of an e-mail address, which is configurable by the sender. So, for example, an e-mail from phisher@bank-of-america-online.com could be configured by the sender to have a display name of “B of A Customer Service”, in order to entice the recipient to open the message and follow links contained within.

It would be of great assistance to e-mail recipients if a system and method existed for reliably accrediting senders of electronic mail messages.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

The present invention combines the effective aspects of stamping outbound e-mail with a registration system for e-mail senders. A person or other entity (known henceforth as a mail sender, or simply a sender) participates by registering From: line information with a trusted third-party repository known as a stamp authority. When the sender sends an e-mail message, a hash of the From: line is compared against the From: line information for the sender stored in the repository. If the result is a match, the e-mail is allowed to be sent, subject to any other restrictions imposed by the stamping process. If there is not a match, then the e-mail is prevented from being stamped.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

FIG. 1 is a block diagram of the overall architecture of an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 2 is a flowchart illustrating a method of stamping e-mail messages with From: header authentication in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS

The use of stamps is a powerful, economically-driven solution to address the damage caused by spam and its negative after-effects such as false positives, spoofed messages and viruses. It shifts the burden of the high cost of fighting spam from the recipients to the senders of email. Stamping identifies and labels the “good” mail with stamps paid for by responsible high-volume senders who are subject to sender-level accreditation and made accountable for trusted email practices. Various stamping systems and methods are in conventional use, for example as described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,999,967 to Sundsted, which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.

The present invention makes use of stamping technology by making the availability of a stamp dependent on a match between the From: header in an outbound e-mail and a From: header previously registered with a stamp authority.

FIG. 1 is a block diagram that illustrates the interaction of various components of an e-mail stamping system. FIG. 1 includes a stamp authority 102 having a registration database 114 and a stamp generator 106; a mail sender 104 having an imprinter 108; and a mailbox provider 110, having a stamp checker 112 and a mailbox 116.

Mail sender 104 sends e-mails to one or more recipients—typically to a large number of recipients, though for clarity of description we assume a single recipient in this instance without any loss of generality. When mail sender 104 sends an e-mail that he wishes to have stamped, the e-mail preferably is transmitted to imprinter 108, which creates appropriate stamp header fields as described below, calculates a hash of the message, and sends the hash to stamp generator 106 to be signed and returned as a stamp. After receiving a stamp back from stamp generator 106, imprinter 108 then sends the e-mail to its intended recipient.

When stamp generator 106 receives the hash to be stamped from imprinter 108, it verifies that the mail sender 104 is authorized to use a stamp—for example, it verifies that the mail sender 104 is up to date on payments, has stamps in his account, has not violated any business rules that limit his ability to stamp e-mail, etc. Preferably imprinter 108 connects in real time to stamp authority 102 to have stamp generator 106 perform the verification; alternatively, outgoing e-mails can be queued and the verification process can take place during a batch update when connection to stamp authority 102 is available.

In addition to verifying that the mail sender 104 is authorized to use a stamp, stamp generator 106 also determines whether the From: header information included in the message matches the header information stored in registration database 114, as described further below.

Once stamp generator 106 determines that mail sender 104 is authorized to use a stamp and that the From: header information in the messages is legitimate, it generates a stamp and provides the stamp to imprinter 108 to allow the e-mail to be sent.

The e-mail then travels in a conventional method to a mailbox provider 110. Upon arrival, stamp checker 112 examines the stamp to determine whether the stamp is valid as described further below. If the stamp is valid, then the e-mail is delivered to the mailbox 116 of the addressed recipient, subject to any additional rules imposed by the mailbox provider or the recipient herself. If the stamp is not valid, this indicates that there might have been external tampering, or a transmission or other error, and the e-mail is rejected.

Stamp authority 102 is an agent that oversees the stamping process by issuing stamps to mail senders and enforcing business rules related to the sending of e-mail by the mail senders. In addition, a mail sender 104 registers complete From: line information with stamp authority 102, and the information is then maintained in a registration database 114 for subsequent verification when mail sender 104 attempts to obtain a stamp for an e-mail message.

FIG. 2 illustrates a method of e-mail stamping with From: header validation in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

Mail sender 104 initially sends 202 a message to be stamped to imprinter 108. In a preferred embodiment, a stamp is unique for each message, and is a cryptographic object contained within the header of the e-mail message. The stamp includes a variety of header fields, for example:

-   X-StampAuthority-Rcpto: joe@example.com -   X-StampAuthority-Reply-To: mary@example.com -   X-StampAuthority-Sender: amy@example.com -   X-StampAuthority: 1; i=“12345”; -   s=“0000001C0000001C0001000141D32376000000010000001300000002”; -   e=“20040612T123256”; d=“20040608T082310”; o=“342AC5”; t=“2”; -   h=“4Io7sVcs55HmRWhSE3QucCKHc1U=”; -   f=“QmlnIFRydWNrcyBvZmZlcnNAYmlndHJ1Y2tzlmNvbQ==”; -   b=“6MdkylkSixEEfv7oh38fO6O2uic=”; -   X-StampAuthority-Sig: -   MfowCwYJKoZIhvcNAQEBA0sAMEgCQQDNZ+V7wcxLqyAQR -   iHtMySKtD5UfT/rdFzaGehCmp8QECDKhPKqRC2EMbvBXZVdNIo500yrPayUKBYxfj -   Mcxc5AgMBAAE=     The particular header fields chosen to implement the present     invention may be determined according to the needs of the     implementer. In a preferred embodiment, one header field includes a     parameter containing a base64-encoded normalized From: header value.

To normalize, in one embodiment the following rules are observed: the comment part must have any surrounding full quotation marks and surrounding parentheses removed. All whitespace characters must be preserved. The address part must not include a comma, more than one @ character, or a colon. The address part must have any surrounding angle braces preserved. If the address part lacks surrounding angle braces, surrounding angle braces must be added. In the “f” parameter, the comment part precedes the address part and is separated from the address part by exactly one space character. The result is base64 encoded for transport.

Imprinter 108 also adds a header transit hash to the message, represented by the “h=” string in the example shown above, and a body transit hash, represented by the “b=” string in the example shown above. In a preferred embodiment, the “h” parameter contains the base64 encoded SHA1 hash of data specific to the email message stamped. The inclusion of the hash in the stamp binds the stamp to the message headers, and it protects message headers during transit by allowing filters to detect if message headers have been modified. The “b” parameter contains the base64 encoded SHAL hash of data specific to the email message stamped. The inclusion of the hash in the stamp binds the stamp to the message body, and it protects the message body during transit by allowing filters to detect if the message has been modified.

Once the stamp fields and hash are created 204, imprinter 108 forwards the hash to stamp generator 106, which verifies 206 that the sender is authorized to issue a stamp. A mail sender 104 may be ineligible to issue a stamp if, for example, the sender has used up all of the stamps purchased from stamp authority 102.

Stamp generator 106 also verifies From: header information against the From: header registered in registration database 114. Preferably, if 208 there is not a match between what is registered and what is in the e-mail header, stamp generator 106 will reject 210 the message. If there is a match and the mail sender 104 is otherwise allowed to send a stamped message, stamp generator 106 adds 212 its signature to the header and returns the message to imprinter 108, which then sends 214 the message to the message's specified recipient.

In one embodiment, stamp generator 106 has a private/public key pair generated in a conventional manner. Stamp generator 106 uses the parameters such as those listed below and its private key to create a transit signature using a cryptographic algorithm, for example RSASSA-PKCS1-V1_(—)5. The parameters used by the stamp generator 106 to create the stamp in one embodiment are: a version number of the stamping protocol; a unique ID for that stamp; an indication of a stamp type (adult, commercial, etc.); a hash of the message created from the message and the stamp fields (obtained from imprinter 108 as described above); Sender: and From: information (obtained from the message envelope by imprinter 108); and RCPT TO: information (obtained from the message envelope by imprinter 108). Other parameters could also be used as deemed appropriate by an implementer of such a system.

The creation of the transit signature in a preferred embodiment first involves the creation of a hash of all of the fields being signed (which includes all stamp fields and the message hash), and then the signing algorithm is implied. Thus, there are essentially two hash operations being performed; the first operation is of the entire message and the stamp fields, which yields a value that is then inserted as one of the fields in the stamp. This field, along with all other stamp authority 102 fields, is then hashed in a second hash operation, the value of which is then signed using cryptography. In this way, these stamp authority 102 fields can be validated without the entire message being present. In a preferred embodiment, the above parameters including the transit signature, combined with the certificate, create a fully-formed stamp.

When the e-mail is received by mailbox provider 110, stamp checker 112 checks 216 the signature on the stamped e-mail to determine whether it is valid.

In one embodiment, the certificate is verified by stamp checker 112 as follows. Stamp checker 112 uses the stamp authority's public key previously obtained. Next, stamp checker 112 determines a hash of the fields in the certificate. Stamp checker 112 then takes the hash, the stamp authority public key, and the certificate signature and performs a signature verification operation to check whether the signature of the certificate (and hence the certificate) is valid.

If 218 the certificate is not valid, stamp checker 112 rejects 220 the message. If the message is rejected, additional steps can be taken, for example the sender of the message could be notified that a message was received claiming to be from the sender 104 but was not successfully validated. Preferably, a report is also made 222 to the stamp authority 102.

If 218 the certificate is valid, then the e-mail is delivered 224 by mailbox provider 110 to the mailbox 116 of the specified recipient, subject to any other delivery rules that the mailbox provider or owner may have set up for mail handling. Preferably, a report is then made 222 to the stamp authority 102, so that the stamp can be cancelled and not reused.

In an alternative embodiment of the invention, rather than using a hash of the From: line as described above, a mail sender 104 instead obtains from stamp authority 102 a signed certificate, issued by the stamp authority 102, certifying that the sender 104 is accredited, i.e. that the sender is legitimate. The mail sender 104 then attaches the certificate to an e-mail message, for example using Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM); by embedding the certificate; or using other methods of domain authentication known in the art. When mailbox provider 110 receives the e-mail message, it compares the embedded certificate against the From: header in the message. If there is a match, then the message is delivered to the mailbox 116 of the addressee. If not, the message is rejected.

In another alternative embodiment, mail sender 104 registers its From: address with stamp authority 102. Regardless of whether mail sender 104 indicates to mailbox provider 110 that it should query the stamp authority's registration database 114 of registered mail senders, mailbox provider 110 makes such a query, and determines whether the From: header in the received message matches a From: header registered with stamp authority 102 as being associated with that mail sender 104. If so, the message is delivered to the address's mailbox 116. If not, the message is rejected.

The present invention has been described in particular detail with respect to a limited number of embodiments. Those of skill in the art will appreciate that the invention may additionally be practiced in other embodiments. First, the particular naming of the components, capitalization of terms, the attributes, data structures, or any other programming or structural aspect is not mandatory or significant, and the mechanisms that implement the invention or its features may have different names, formats, or protocols. Further, the system may be implemented via a combination of hardware and software, as described, or entirely in hardware elements. Also, the particular division of functionality between the various system components described herein is merely exemplary, and not mandatory; functions performed by a single system component may instead be performed by multiple components, and functions performed by multiple components may instead performed by a single component. For example, the particular functions of the stamp generator 106 and so forth may be provided in many or one module.

Some portions of the above description present the feature of the present invention in terms of algorithms and symbolic representations of operations on information. These algorithmic descriptions and representations are the means used by those skilled in the art of e-mail security to most effectively convey the substance of their work to others skilled in the art. These operations, while described functionally or logically, are understood to be implemented by computer programs. Furthermore, it has also proven convenient at times, to refer to these arrangements of operations as modules or code devices, without loss of generality.

It should be borne in mind, however, that all of these and similar terms are to be associated with the appropriate physical quantities and are merely convenient labels applied to these quantities. Unless specifically stated otherwise as apparent from the present discussion, it is appreciated that throughout the description, discussions utilizing terms such as “processing” or “computing” or “calculating” or “determining” or “displaying” or the like, refer to the action and processes of a computer system, or similar electronic computing device, that manipulates and transforms data represented as physical (electronic) quantities within the computer system memories or registers or other such information storage, transmission or display devices.

Certain aspects of the present invention include process steps and instructions described herein in the form of an algorithm. It should be noted that the process steps and instructions of the present invention could be embodied in software, firmware or hardware, and when embodied in software, could be downloaded to reside on and be operated from different platforms used by real time network operating systems.

The present invention also relates to an apparatus for performing the operations herein. This apparatus may be specially constructed for the required purposes, or it may comprise a general-purpose computer selectively activated or reconfigured by a computer program stored in the computer. Such a computer program may be stored in a computer readable storage medium, such as, but is not limited to, any type of disk including floppy disks, optical disks, CD-ROMs, magnetic-optical disks, read-only memories (ROMs), random access memories (RAMs), EPROMs, EEPROMs, magnetic or optical cards, application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), or any type of media suitable for storing electronic instructions, and each coupled to a computer system bus. Furthermore, the computers referred to in the specification may include a single processor or may be architectures employing multiple processor designs for increased computing capability.

The algorithms and displays presented herein are not inherently related to any particular computer or other apparatus. Various general-purpose systems may also be used with programs in accordance with the teachings herein, or it may prove convenient to construct more specialized apparatus to perform the required method steps. The required structure for a variety of these systems will appear from the description above. In addition, the present invention is not described with reference to any particular programming language. It is appreciated that a variety of programming languages may be used to implement the teachings of the present invention as described herein, and any references to specific languages are provided for disclosure of enablement and best mode of the present invention.

Finally, it should be noted that the language used in the specification has been principally selected for readability and instructional purposes, and may not have been selected to delineate or circumscribe the inventive subject matter. Accordingly, the disclosure of the present invention is intended to be illustrative, but not limiting, of the scope of the invention. 

1. A method for validating a sender of an e-mail message, the method comprising: receiving an e-mail from the sender, the e-mail including a header, the header having a first field, the contents of the first field indicating the sender's identity; determining that the sender is authorized to use the identity indicated by the contents first field; and inserting a second field in the header, the contents of the second field indicating that the sender is authorized to use the identity indicated by the contents of the first field.
 2. The method of claim 1, further comprising: returning the e-mail to the sender.
 3. The method of claim 1, further comprising: sending the e-mail to a recipient indicated in the header.
 4. The method of claim 1 wherein the contents of the second field are cryptographically encoded.
 5. A computer-implemented method for validating a sender of an e-mail message, the method comprising: registering identification information about an e-mail sender with an authority; sending a header associated with an e-mail message from the e-mail sender to the authority, the header including origination information, the origination information indicating that the associated the e-mail message is from the e-mail sender; receiving from the authority a modified header, the modified header associated with the e-mail message and additionally including a token indicating that the origination information is accurate; and sending the e-mail message and the associated modified header to a recipient.
 6. A computer program product for validating a sender of an e-mail message, the computer program product stored on a computer-readable medium and including instructions configured to cause a processor to carry out the steps of: registering identification information about an e-mail sender with an authority; sending a header associated with an e-mail message from the e-mail sender to the authority, the header including origination information, the origination information indicating that the associated the e-mail message is from the e-mail sender; receiving from the authority a modified header, the modified header associated with the e-mail message and additionally including a token indicating that the origination information is accurate; and sending the e-mail message and the associated modified header to a recipient.
 7. A system for validating a sender of an e-mail message, comprising: a stamp authority, further comprising: a registration database for storing identification information about an e-mail sender; a stamp generator for receiving from the e-mail sender a header associated with an e-mail message, the header including origination information, the origination information indicating that the associated the e-mail message is from the e-mail sender; and wherein the stamp generator is further adapted to determine that the identification information about the e-mail sender stored in the registration database matches the origination information in the header, and to create a modified header, the modified header associated with the e-mail message and additionally including a token indicating that the origination information is accurate. 